The Black Star (Book 3)

by Edward W. Robertson

  A couple hours later, Dante shifted position. "He's there. In his palace."

  "Better news than if he weren't," Blays said. "Unless he were off in a temple renouncing his wicked ways. What's he doing?"

  "Writing. Quit bothering me."

  Blays sighed thinly. A half hour later, he got up to go stroll around. Somburr followed him out of the entry of the round. "Where are you going?"

  "Anywhere," Blays said.

  "Now's not the time to wander."

  "You realize I'm not—and haven't been for years—Narashtovik's servant?"

  "I do," Somburr said. "And I believe you're smart enough to know better than to jeopardize our mission because you're bored."

  Blays chuckled. "Keen one, aren't you? I'll be good."

  He returned inside the round. A whole lot of nothing transpired. Just after sunset, Dante let out a breath and his eyes lit up the way they always did when he withdrew from the mind of a dead thing and came back to the here and now.

  "The Minister's been in his chambers all day. Had his food brought to him. Held a couple of meetings, also in his chambers. One was about logistics. Very tedious. Because they've been very thorough. Nothing there for us, although it will be useful to Olivander."

  Dante glanced around, rubbing the corners of his eyes. "The other was a civil issue. Apparently the citizens assigned to do all the extra lorbell-gathering have grown resentful of their new responsibilities. Today, a team of them refused to work until their pay was increased. The Minister ordered them to be executed—and for wages to be increased for everyone else."

  "How is that relevant?" Somburr said.

  "I'm not sure. There may be a domestic angle we can exploit."

  "Like poisoning the lorbells," Blays said.

  Dante gave him a look. "We're not poisoning the lorbells."

  "Why not? Like it's so much more righteous to kill his soldiers on the battlefield where we can die too?"

  "It's at least ten percent more righteous."

  "All right, agreed, but given the circumstances of our cause, I think everything we do is extra righteous." Blays stood and paced, stretching his legs. "Anyway, I wasn't serious."

  "This is the Minister in a nutshell," Dante said. "Brutal and highly effective at getting the most from each act of that brutality. He kills the dissidents, discouraging others, then cuts the legs out beneath their resentment by raising wages."

  "What a jerk. Sounds like we should kill him or something."

  "If he keeps refusing to leave his palace, it's not going to be easy."

  "What about Cellen?" Somburr said.

  "I didn't see it directly," Dante said. "But he kept touching the front pocket of his shirt. Either he's got a rash, or that's where he's keeping it."

  That was the end of the first day. On the second day, Blays let himself sleep in until well after sunrise, and it was excellent. He ate some lorbell and went to pee. In the upper branches, scouts ruffled the leaves, but Mourn appeared to have gone off somewhere. Back in the round, Dante was deep in one of his dead-animal trances.

  Blays sat near the others. "As long as we're sitting around, we may as well put our heads together. Seems to me there are two general routes here: either we go to the Minister, or we do as planned and grab him up as soon as he steps into the open."

  "Wrong," Cee said. "There's a hundred different things we could do. Like tricking him into giving it up."

  "How are we going to do that? Tell him this was all a big mistake, and what he thinks is Cellen is actually the egg of a giant raven? One that is growing increasingly angry at being separated from its young?"

  "I don't know how we would. I'm just saying we could."

  "Fair enough. And good thinking, too. It's no wonder the bossman keeps you around."

  "Is anything off the table?" Somburr asked.

  Blays scrunched his eyebrows together. "Why would it be?"

  "Because for most people, the means can get too mean to justify the ends."

  "Why do I feel like that comment is directed at me?"

  "Vanity, I would imagine."

  Blays burst out laughing. "For the purpose of this discussion, nothing is off the table. I'll keep my judgment of your character to myself."

  Somburr leaned forward. "If we could somehow kill everyone in the Minister's tree, you would have no objection?"

  "Let me check. Ah yes, I do have a soul. Thus: objections. But hypothetically speaking, how many people are in that tree?"

  "Ten thousand."

  "Ten thousand? In one tree?"

  "It includes some five hundred feet of habitable height. Nine separate lofts. Each loft includes some four to twelve flats. Rounds surround the entire trunk of the tree. You can see how the living space adds up."

  Blays glanced to the side. "Most of those who live in it are innocent, or near enough to it. Weighed against all the lives lost in a clash against Narashtovik. Could you guarantee killing them would put Cellen in our hands?"

  Somburr touched his index fingers together. "As you say, I have been speaking hypothetically. When all that matters is the goal, many new options become clear."

  "Well, it's not up to me, is it? So I say we come up with anything that could work, pass it on to Wise Leader over there, and let him decide how much his conscience can handle."

  Somburr smiled. "Your self-awareness has been sorely missed."

  "Sorry about that. So do you have a way to take them all out and get us Cellen or not?"

  "I might be able to neutralize the citizens. But it would be too chaotic to guarantee where the Black Star winds up."

  Ast, quiet this whole time, raised his head. "I would say he is a man of great ego. If I were to scheme to deceive him, I would prey on that."

  "Good," Blays said. "How?"

  "I don't know."

  "Even better you can admit that." He met their eyes in turn. "Look, the point is, we're more limited by our own thinking than the circumstances at hand. I hope we get a solution dropped in our laps. Until that happens, the broader our thinking, the sooner we'll get where we want to be."

  They kicked around a few more ideas, but it was mostly more what-ifs and suppose-so's. As the morning shifted to afternoon and approached the evening, Dante withdrew from his otherworldly sight to tend to his body.

  When he came back to the round, he shook his head. "Nothing new. He's been in his rooms all day. The only words he's spoken are to tell the servants what he'd like to eat next."

  "Arsenic?" Blays said. "Please tell me it's arsenic. Hey, why don't we poison his food?"

  "Because he has one servant watching its preparation at all times and another to taste it for him."

  Outside, someone crunched through the leaves. Cee reached for her bow. Distantly, Blays felt Dante reach for the nether. But it was just Mourn. His boots were dark with damp and soil, his face streaked with dried gray mud.

  "I think we should move the troops closer," he suggested once he'd climbed up the roots.

  "What did you see?" Dante said. "Have the Minister's soldiers been on the march?"

  "Probably. Given that they're soldiers, and marching is what soldiers do, if only to impress their captains. But I didn't see any strategic movements."

  "Then why shift our people?"

  He shrugged his broad norren shoulders. "Because they're too far away. And I found a better place for them."

  A tactical discussion ensued involving the Minister's unknown scouting capacities and the ability of two hundred Narashtovik soldiers to camp within his borders without being noticed. Blays listened, because why not, but had no strong opinions either way.

  "We've taken a conservative stance," Dante said. "There's no reason to move them up until we're closer to understanding what we need to do next."

  "That appears to be true," Mourn said. "But you know where the Minister is. You know where Cellen is. When you figure out how to extract the latter from the former, do you want to wait two days for your support to arrive? Or a few hour
s?"

  "Is that a trick question?" Blays said.

  "I walked around, because walking around is how you see new things, and I found a nice valley. Good cover. Much closer." He swept his dark, shaggy hair from his brows. "The question is whether you trust your people to go unseen. And if they are seen, to take care of those who saw them."

  Dante squeezed the bridge of his nose. "Tell me where to move them."

  A bunch of directions ensued, followed by Dante mumbling into his loon. Presumably, more than fifty miles away, two hundred armed men were getting to their feet and drawing closer. Blays wasn't sure what to think. Sitting on his ass in a tree all day was not his idea of productive behavior, and until that were rectified, you might as well leave everyone else out of harm's way.

  But maybe bringing them closer would provoke Dante to more aggressive action. Like Mourn had said, they already knew exactly where their target was. It seemed to him that, with that knowledge in hand, you ought to be able to work out the next step by producing one idea after another until you ran out of bad ones and tripped over a good one.

  Alas, he was no longer a brain of the operation. More like an arm. Or maybe an appendix, fit to burst. As the third day dawned, to delay such an explosion, he decided to attempt to navigate Somburr's maze-like mind instead. Somburr suggested that, with the right type and quantity of poison, they might sprinkle it all around the Minister's loren. In time, the tree would draw up the water and soil, pass it into the lorbells, and thus into the population. He admitted the plan would take weeks, if not months, to bear fruit, so to speak, but seemed more concerned about the timeline than the morality. Eventually, Blays wandered off onto the flat to clear his head.

  "Oh shit." Dante's voice echoed from inside the round. "Oh shit."

  Blays recognized the tone. He dashed back, bursting through the brown blankets hung over the entryway. "Are we doomed? We're doomed, aren't we?"

  Dante stared across the vacant space of the round. "The Minister's just spoken with his advisors. He suspects Lew was a Narashtovik spy. He wants to move—soon. Before we've got time to prepare for their invasion."

  "How long?" Somburr said.

  "He says that, if the channel is cut through the Woduns at a low enough elevation, the snows will be no matter. His people say the armies will be ready within a week."

  "How many?"

  "Twenty thousand. Or more." Dante's face was as pale as the fibrous mat between the skin of a lorbell and its sweet pulp. "How can they have so many?"

  Somburr bared his teeth. "Irrelevant. All that matters is it's too many."

  "So." Dante looked to Blays. "He still hasn't left his chambers. But once the troops arrive, he intends to go out and see them. That may be our only chance to strike him before he opens the mountains."

  Blays didn't know why it was his job to respond to this, but he couldn't stop himself. "When his entire army is watching."

  "Maybe we can hit him while he's coming down the stairs."

  "Like I said: army."

  "We'll have soldiers of our own."

  Cee laughed bitterly. "And they'll have a hell of a time staying hidden when, a few days from now, twenty thousand members of our sworn enemy turn the forest into one big campground. How are we going to get through them?"

  "I don't know!" Dante lurched to his feet. "But unless you've got a better idea, this is our best shot. Do I need to remind you that we don't need to survive to achieve our goal? All we need to do is get our hands on Cellen long enough to use it. As soon as it's gone, Narashtovik is safe for another thousand years."

  Everyone fell quiet for a bit, which was distressing, because it gave Blays too much time to agree with himself that it was time to speak up. "So I may have forgotten to mention this, but did I ever tell you I can walk through walls?"

  Dante swung his head around so hard it was a wonder it didn't fly off his neck. "What are you jabbering about?"

  "I mean that, if you had the right kind of wall in front of me, I could walk through it as if it weren't there."

  "Are you being serious? Is this something you learned from Minn? And what do you mean, the right kind of wall?"

  "I can walk through stone. I don't think I can walk through wood. Don't know why. Except maybe that trees are stubborn." Blays patted the wall of the round. "Present company excluded, faithful home-tree."

  "Parts of the palace are stone. It's one of the only buildings in Corl that uses it."

  "That's a good bit of irony. The Minister walls himself behind the strongest material he can, and it's the one thing that can't keep me out."

  "So how do you get to the palace?" Cee said.

  Dante twisted his sideburn. "The same way we got to the deepstone."

  "An incident that may have tipped them to our methods," Somburr said. "You have eyes on the loft. Does security look any different?"

  "He's got more troops around. Very few people are being allowed into the palace."

  "Questions to answer: does he sleep alone? Do his bodyguards check on him at night? If so, how often? Assume Blays can get the item outside, but that they will be alerted that something has gone wrong. If they shut down the loren's staircase, how do we get down?"

  Dante rubbed his palms together. "Are we doing this?"

  "Answering those questions will clarify our course."

  "What he said," Blays said. "I gotta say, whatever those answers turn out to be, I like this idea a whole lot more than trying to wrestle Cellen away from him while he's on his way to review his endless hordes of warriors."

  Dante nodded. "I'll tell the men to head to the new valley and be ready to move here at a moment's notice. I'd better let Nak know what they'll be up against if we bungle this." He gave Blays one of his looks. "Then we'll see about getting you into the palace."

  That meant more sitting for Blays, but he did so with considerably more patience and satisfaction than he had during the last couple days. After a few minutes, it occurred to him that he'd only walked through rock once, and given that it didn't sound like anything was going to go down until tomorrow night at the soonest, he better go make sure the ability was something he could repeat. Mourn had scouted the lay of the land, so Blays had him lead the way to a suitable practice ground: a tall, tapering spur of rock just a couple feet wide at its end.

  Blays accumulated a few bruises with his initial efforts, but as soon as he settled down, remembered that he'd done this before, and convinced himself he would do it again, he did. He reappeared on the other side of the spur with a grin big enough to swallow himself.

  "That probably didn't look too impressive, what with me being invisible." He reached out and knocked on the rock. "But I just walked straight through this thing."

  Mourn stared at it. "I wonder how it feels about that."

  Blays practiced until his control began to waver. He returned to the tree pleased with himself, confident that, whatever else happened, he'd be able to uphold his end of the plan.

  It was a quiet day. Dante drew a fastidious map of the palace, charting entrances, rooms, and which parts of the building were made out of stone.

  "Right here." He tapped the sketch's outer wall, drawn with the solid dark line that meant it was rock, then used his finger to follow a path up two flights of stairs to the middle of the third floor. A block of rooms in the center was bordered with the same solid lines. "These are his quarters. This is his bedroom. You'll have to go through its door like a normal person—and that's it. The rest of the time, you can walk around as a ghost."

  "You're sure he keeps it on him?" Blays said. "Bear in mind, and I know this is a tricky one, but I'm not you. I can only shadowalk for ten or twelve minutes before I tire out."

  "I can't shadowalk at all. I was hoping you might teach me some day."

  "Wouldn't that be something. Specifically, it would be something for a much later date, when the fate of everything doesn't hang in the balance."

  Dante stood up from the maps. "I'm sure he keeps it on him. I'l
l keep watching him, though. We've still got much to learn."

  Dante immediately went to sleep, resting up before he spent the night observing the Minister's sleep routine. Blays and Somburr went outside to chat about how to get to the palace loft and back down to the ground. Somburr's simple disguises sounded feasible, if prone to disruptions from other soldiers. Somburr spent the rest of the day drilling Blays in Weslean, trying to teach him enough to get by if for some reason he were directly questioned as they headed up or down the stairs. This was highly annoying work, but at least it passed the time.

  When Blays went to bed, Dante was back up, staring into space. Blays woke a few times that night, but it didn't look as if Dante had moved an inch.

  By morning, his eyes were puffy, and though neither of them was the model of hygiene at that moment, Dante's hair looked flatter and greasier than ever. "He sleeps with it. Keeps it in a bag in his pocket and literally keeps it under his pillow at night."

  Blays shrugged. "Better that than us having no idea where it is."

  "We caught another break, too. His bodyguards stay outside his quarters all night. After all, there's only one way in, and the walls are solid stone. What would they need to check in on?"

  Somburr slitted his eyes. "Sound like you ought to shadowalk in, slash his throat, and then shadowalk out. If we move in the middle of the night, it will be hours before anyone's aware."

  "That would be my recommendation," Dante said. "Also, they're using passwords on the drawbridges—the three-part one, and the one up to the Minister's flat. I've already spied them out."

  "They'll change them nightly. You'll want to listen tonight, too."

  "I will. But now I need to sleep."

  While Dante snoozed, Blays went over the language some more. It seemed kind of pointless, given that he couldn't understand it well enough to know what he was being asked, but then Somburr showed him a set of gestures Somburr would use to let him know how to reply: yes, no, his name, etc.

  Dante got up early that afternoon, conversed with Nak for a while, then sent the scouts to keep tabs on the path between them and their troops, who would start marching toward the capital at dusk. If Dante were coordinating everything right, and it didn't hit any snags, Narashtovik's troops would arrive at the advance team's loren at the same time Dante, Blays, and Somburr were infiltrating the city.